Two vulnerabilities have been discovered in the International Components
for Unicode, possibly resulting in the remote execution of arbitrary code
or a Denial of Service.

Affected Packages

Package

dev-libs/icu on all architectures

Affected versions

< 3.8.1-r1

Unaffected versions

>= 3.8.1-r1revision >= 3.6-r2

Background

International Components for Unicode is a set of C/C++ and Java
libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support for software
applications.

Description

Will Drewry (Google Security) reported a vulnerability in the regular
expression engine when using back references to capture \0 characters
(CVE-2007-4770). He also found that the backtracking stack size is not
limited, possibly allowing for a heap-based buffer overflow
(CVE-2007-4771).

Impact

A remote attacker could submit specially crafted regular expressions to
an application using the library, possibly resulting in the remote
execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the
application or a Denial of Service.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All International Components for Unicode users should upgrade to the
latest version: